


hope is a thing born from a wish

by A_Thousand_Skies (cywscross)



Series: Dr. Stone Oneshots [1]
Category: Dr. STONE (Anime), Dr. STONE (Manga)
Genre: Don't copy to another site, F/M, Fluff, Late Night Conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 11:55:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21391747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cywscross/pseuds/A_Thousand_Skies
Summary: Senkuu and Ruri go for a midnight walk.
Relationships: Ishigami Senkuu/Ruri
Series: Dr. Stone Oneshots [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1542208
Comments: 6
Kudos: 87





	hope is a thing born from a wish

**Author's Note:**

> For the [100prompts challenge on DW](https://100prompts.dreamwidth.org/).
> 
> [**Prompt:** 026\. Hope](https://cywscross.dreamwidth.org/17140.html)
> 
> [Cross-Posted from Tumblr](https://a-stone-world-saga.tumblr.com/post/188852959451/senkuu-are-you-busy-senkuu-glances-up-from)

“Senkuu? Are you busy?”

Senkuu glances up from the melting contents of the test tubes he’s been waiting on. Ruri is standing in the doorway, one hand pushing the curtain aside, half-turned away like she’s unsure of her welcome. Haloed behind her, the moon hangs heavy and full in the clear night sky.

“Nah,” Senkuu shrugs, setting his latest experiment to the side. “I have to wait for these to defrost first, so the next step can wait until morning. Chrome will complain if I start without him anyway.” He considers her for a moment. “It’s late. Did you need something?”

Ruri’s chin dips into the fur of her coat but her gaze remains on him. “I couldn’t sleep,” She admits. “So I thought I would go for a walk.” She pauses, eyes darting away, then back. “Kohaku told me you don’t sleep much, so I wondered if you would like to come with me?”

Senkuu stares at her, more than a little surprised. He must take too long to answer though because she winces like she’s committed some horrible offense, and in the next second, she’s already apologizing, “I’m sorry, I overstepped, I just thought-”

Senkuu snorts loudly, and then has to hide a wince of his own because he always forgets to be a little gentler with Ruri the way everyone else naturally seems to be around her. It’s not really in his nature though, to be _careful_ with people, except maybe Suika, sometimes, since she’s a child. But Ruri... Ruri’s somehow always registered as _tough_ in his mind, when he thinks about her, and so it never occurs to him right away that she’s technically more delicate than all the other people he usually interacts with.

Ah well, too late to take it back now. Onward and through it is. “Don’t be stupid, why would you be overstepping?” He grumbles, pushing to his feet and stretching the stiffness out of his muscles. “Besides, I don’t have anything better to do right now, and I could do with some fresh air. Let me just get my coat.”

He fetches it from the wall hooks in the corner, and then rakes a critical eye over Ruri before grabbing an extra scarf as well.

“Jeez,” He grumbles, sparing a moment to blow out the oil lamp on the table before joining Ruri at the door. She’s still blinking owlishly at him, like she fully expected to be turned down in the first place. Senkuu just sighs and loops the scarf around her neck, knotting it loosely before tucking most of it inside the collar of her coat to make sure it does its job. “I know you’re not sick anymore, but that doesn’t mean you can’t _get_ sick again. It’s almost winter; look after yourself a little better.”

He pulls on his own coat, and when he glances up again, he finds Ruri smiling at him, faint and softly delighted the way her sister’s brashly confident grins almost never are. Sometimes, Senkuu looks at them and can’t believe they’re sisters. But they have the exact same steel in them, straight down to the core; they just show it in different ways.

They don’t need words as they set out for the surrounding woods, although Senkuu does smirk a little when he spots the bridge leading to the village in the distance. “How’d you slip past your guards?”

Ruri tips a secretive smile up at him this time, something just shy of mischievous. “I just told them I had important priestess secrets to impart to the village chief right away because it’s a full moon. Same with the guards on bridge duty.”

Senkuu barks out a laugh. “You’re lucky it’s not Kinrou and Ginrou’s shift at the moment; they’d never believe that anymore.”

“Why do you think I didn’t come earlier?” Ruri retorts lightly, and for a moment, they grin at each other like old friends.

The days have been getting shorter, the nights longer, and the woods feel extra quiet as they walk through them. The trees whisper with the night breeze all around them, and it’s peaceful in a way Senkuu’s modern world probably never could be. He misses it of course, but the longer he lives in this Stone World, the more he thinks that it isn’t so terrible, even if a lot of everyday activities he once took for granted aren’t so convenient anymore.

As if reading his mind, Ruri peers over at him, eyes bright with curiosity as she asks, “Kohaku and Chrome have caught me up on much of your modern world, but was it so very different? Were there still places like this in your time?”

Senkuu makes a considering noise as they step out onto the grassy bank of one of the nearby rivers. The water is clear enough that in some of the calmer parts, he can see right to the bottom like there isn’t even anything there.

“Some,” He says to Ruri. “In some parts of the world, there were still a few pockets of civilization similar to Ishigami Village. And lots of places still had natural wildlife and vegetation, although if you compare it to now, you could say there weren’t nearly as many.” He grimaces a little. “I suppose that’s one issue with civilization advancing as far as it did. The planet can only produce so many resources at a time, and we humans always wanted more. Pollution was a pretty big problem too - our species tend to generate a lot of garbage, and nature had to pay for that.”

They stop right by a mostly smooth spike of rock that juts out over the water, and once Senkuu’s hoisted himself up onto it, he turns to offer his hand to Ruri, who takes it firmly and lets him pull her up as well. They sit right by the edge, legs dangling above the river, and the moon is low enough on the horizon that it almost looks like the water is pouring right into it.

“But you made incredible things too,” Ruri says, sounding a touch wistful, imagining a world that Senkuu knows won’t ever be exactly the way reality was, no matter how well he tries to describe it.

Humanity’s legacy, forgotten by humanity.

“We make incredible things now,” He says out loud, flashing a smirk when Ruri looks up at him again with a startled expression. “We’re all humans, even in this world, and we’re still alive. We’ll go on to make more and more incredible things, and it won’t ever be the same, but it’ll still be pretty exciting.”

Ruri’s eyes widen, and for a long minute, even after Senkuu turns to stare out at the sprawling woods in front of them again, she doesn’t look away. Senkuu lets her at it, content with the silence between them. It’s comfortable, somehow, even when he’s acutely aware of her gaze on him.

She looks away, at last, but she also sways to the side, her shoulder knocking gently against his, and when he glances down, she’s smiling again. Perhaps it’s Senkuu’s own occasionally whimsical imagination, but somehow, Ruri has a way of _smiling_ that radiates a quiet sort of inner joy now that illness and impending death no longer plague her, as if every breath she can freely take these days is something that makes her happy.

“Tell me something,” She says, her words fogging the air at her lips. “About your world. Something I would like.”

Senkuu’s eyebrows go up, and then he chuckles. “What, electricity and ramen not good enough for you?”

When Ruri only peeks up at him, tentatively expectant, Senkuu sighs and hums in thought for a few seconds, casting his mind back to a childhood lived a lifetime ago.

“Libraries,” He finally says.

Ruri blinks. “Libraries? What’s that?”

Senkuu lifts his hands, outlining the vague shape of a square. “I told you guys what books are, right? Stories and information, _knowledge_, all written down on paper, recorded for everyone to read. Now imagine a whole building of them, lined with shelves, containing hundreds of books, a place where people can go to read them for free. Libraries were a thing all over the world, at least one in every city, dozens in just about every country.” He drops his hands. “The library nearest my house was three floors high. It wasn’t the biggest, but it still had tons of books on every subject you could imagine - fiction and non-fiction, fantasy and adventure stories, physics and chemistry texts, books suitable for everyone from children to adults. It opened early and closed late, so you could spend the whole day in there and read as much as you want. Most of the walls were floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and you know that couch we made for your birthday? Imagine rows of them, right by the windows, where you could sit in the sunlight and just read from morning to night. The third floor had a balcony too, with chairs and tables and umbrellas over them, so you could go outside on nice days and sit in the shade and enjoy a drink and read a book.”

He stops for breath and rubs the back of his neck as he checks Ruri’s expression. “Eh, I don’t know if I’m describing it very well, but I think it would be something you’d like.”

Because Ruri has the same thirst for knowledge as Chrome, as Senkuu himself. It isn’t as science-oriented, but she’s taken to asking him about the Tales. She’s memorized them all from her mother, like every priestess before her, but now that she can, she also wants to know what they _mean_, and that led to questions about other old-world stories, about fairy tales lost to time, romance novels that are more up Taiju’s alley than Senkuu’s, even old theater plays and the famous names that wrote them. Ruri was the first to ask Senkuu for lessons on the written word. It’s slow-going, but Ruri _wants_ with a passion that Senkuu knows very well, and he thinks that in the modern era, they would’ve had to pry her out of the library every day.

“It sounds wonderful,” Ruri announces, drawing Senkuu’s attention back to the present. She claps her hands together, then spreads them, palms up. Her father despairs of the broken skin and new callouses she sports these days, but she insists on helping with their science, now that she can, and she’s just as stubborn as Kohaku when she wants to be.

“One day, I want us to build our own library, in this world,” She continues, gaze focused on some point beyond her hands, a vision of her own in her mind’s eye. “I want books of our own that we’ll be able to write ourselves, good enough to be passed on to the next generation, and the next, and the next.” She folds her hands together and smiles up at him. Her hair glows almost white in the light of the moon, and the determined steel shining from her face is... incandescently captivating. “I think it would be just as exciting as your science, Senkuu.”

Senku huffs a laugh. “Well, why not? I’m not planning on leaving this world without writing down everything I know, and a library’s not complete without a decent science section.” He leans back and grins up at the sky. “A library’s not any harder than everything else we’ve done so far. And one compiled by all the weirdoes we have in our Kingdom of Science? It’ll be one hell of a library!”

It’s not entirely science-oriented, but Senkuu thinks he could see it anyway. Glass is not an impossibility for them anymore. And if Ryuusui can lead the construction of a ship, then a building wouldn’t be difficult.

A library, three stories high, with floor-to-ceiling windows. Why not?

He pushes off his hands, suddenly itching to _do_, to make something, to create. He hops off the rock, then turns back to Ruri, and maybe it’s infectious because she looks just as _alive_ as he feels in this moment. When he holds out his hand, she grasps it, but she also half-leaps off the rock after him, and her laughter spills out into the night - silver-bright and free - when he spins her once before setting her on the ground again.

“Tell me a story, Senkuu,” Ruri requests, cheeks flushed, a little breathless, and so, so alive.

_What can humanity not do, so long as they live on?_

As they begin making their way back towards the village, she slips one hand around the inside of his elbow, fingers light with unspoken question.

Senkuu bends his arm and tucks her hand more securely into the crook of his elbow. Ruri takes a half-step closer, settling into his side as her other hand comes up to join the first.

"Ever heard of old man Homer’s Iliad?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“It’s a long one.”

“I have time. Tell it to me, Senkuu. I want to hear it all.”


End file.
